Bitcoin promotion extended indefinitely

On Nov, 29 we launched a week-long Black Friday promotion. This time it was different. For the very first time you could purchase account upgrades with Bitcoin and we would give a 50% discount to those paying with Bitcoin. Optimistically speaking, we have learned there definitely is a huge potential in Bitcoin payments, but it still needs to be unleashed.

However, we have decided to keep the promo on-going and offer 15% discount for all upgrades paid with Bitcoin.

Infrastructure changes

From time to time we are plagued with internal issues. Servers being overloaded, sometimes dying, traffic spikes causing enormous stress on our machines, DDoS attacks etc. Over the years we have learned how to cope with such issues and internal problems very rarely affect the Wikidot as a service. Yes, there is a lot of redundancy in our setup, several metrics and alarms constantly monitor health of servers and there are mechanisms that can failover to a hot stand-by servers in case any of critical ones fail.

However recently some database and web worker issues affected the stability of Wikidot. We had to take radical steps and literally re-created large parts of our infrastructure. Wikidot is now being hosted in an isolated Virtual Private Cloud within Amazon Web Services. This gives us better connectivity between our 30 servers and improves manageability. As before, servers are spread over multiple availability zones, so in case any zone goes down (which sometimes happen), Wikidot should continue its operation (or at least make the recovery much faster).

We did the transition last Friday. There are still a couple of issues we keep working on, but the overall stability of infrastructure seems fine.

New ad formats for pro sites

Premium site owners can now paste Yandex and Google Adsense asynchronous code snippets within the ad management section of Site Manager.

Layouts improvements

Although Layouts are far from mainstream yet, we can see dozens of Bootstrap-based wikis under construction, which is great. We are working on several improvements and new components, to be announced soon!

I bet you've heard about Bitcoin — a new internet currency that is taking the world by storm. Invented in 2009 by Satoshi Nakamoto, for a few years it remained a niche project — developed by enthusiastic developers, supported by a very small but strong community, now seems to be ready to revolutionize internet payments. There has not been a single financial or economics new source that would not mention Bitcoin in the last few months.

Now the real news — we are excited to announce that Wikidot joins the Bitcoin marketplace and

you can now pay for Wikidot upgrades with Bitcoin!

There's more: if you upgrade or prolong your Wikidot account between now and Sun, 8th Dec and pay with Bitcoin you

save 50% on all upgrades!!!

We hope that accepting Bitcoin is not only an awesome news for our current and future users, but we deeply believe we can help growing the economy based on digital currencies.

Simplicity of design has been one of the most perceptible advantages of Wikidot for many years. Making things limpid and not overwhelming has been one of our priorities from the very beginning, that's for sure. Nevertheless the Web 2.0 (3.0, 4.0…) trends are changing, Wikidot can't afford to stay behind and needs to evolve.

This is why we are proud to present the new era of Wikidot's look&feel. It's the new level of custom design, which gives a tool to create amazingly attractive and sophisticated websites with almost infinite possibilities.

I bet you have noticed. Fall is already here. Summer holidays are over and it is time to get back to work. Teaching, designing, publishing, any kind of work you are passionate about — it can always be done better, smarter and more efficient.

One thing that can definitely help you make your projects even more awesome is a Pro account at Wikidot. Now there is one more reason to upgrade:

Have you ever tried to create a closed or private site for your coworkers, friends or students? The problem is that if your membership policy does not state "Open" you have 3 options:

invite your users one by one to the new site (e.g. by email),

set up a password they can use when joining (password-protected membership),

or let them apply for membership and accept each application individually.

It's not that bad, but we can make it easier. What if your organisation uses a single domain for emails? Burch Kealeysuggested that it would be much easier if he could whitelist a domain in a way that every Wikidot user with an email from whitelisted domains can do a 1-click join.

Today we are more than happy to introduce a new site management panel, aka Site Manager. Apart from visual improvements and cleaner look we tried to optimize its usability and add a bit of "freshness". The old Site Manager itself has grown from a small dashboard to a huge set of panels over the last years. As we discovered it very often introduced a steep learning curve for new users. Not to mention its design is about 6 years old now.

We did not want to re-invent the Manager. To make the transition painless we have preserved the original structure, so Wikidot experts should find their settings within seconds.

Wikidot.com has just experienced about 2-hour downtime due to database issues. The situation has not been critical and no data has been lost. We were able to fix the problem and bring the service back on-line, despite the early-morning Sunday hours.

It is the first downtime of such length for a quite long time. We consider 2 hours to be very long when we think about availability. Usually we try to keep issues from putting Wikidot down and we achieve monthly availability rate of over 99.9%, often reaching 100.0% (as reported by monitoring tools at Pingdom, based on tests on selected number of sites).

I am terribly sorry about the unavailability. This of course gives us hints how to avoid such situations in the future. I also hope that because of the weekend and early morning (UTC) hours the downtime was not that painful, and hopefully not even noticeable for most of our users.